Daniel Jaeckle

"You know, Klipschorn was right I think when he spoke of the 'blanketing' effect of ordinary language, referring, as I recall, to the part that sort of, you know, 'fills in' between the other parts. That part, the 'filling' you might say, of which the expression 'you might say' is a good example, is to me the most interesting part, and of course it might also be called the 'stuffing' I suppose, and there is probably also, in addition, some other word that would do as well, to describe it, or maybe a number of them. But the quality this 'stuffing' has, that the other parts of verbality do not have, is twoparted, perhaps: (1) an 'endless' quality and (2) a 'sludge' quality. . . . The 'sludge' quality is the heaviness that this 'stuff' has, similar to the heavier motor oils, a kind of downward pull but still fluid, if you follow me, and I can't help thinking that this downwardness is valuable, although it's hard to say just how, right at the moment. So, summing up, there is a relation between what I have been saying and what we're doing here at the plant with these plastic buffalo humps." Barthelme [1, pp. 96-97]1

... For example, we would have this delightful account of the games played by the Nymph and the fawn: It is a wond'rous thing, how fleet 'Twas on those little silver feet. With what a pretty skipping grace, It oft would challenge me the Race: And when 'thad left me far away, 'Twould ...

In order to characterize Traherne's predominant process of thought, more than one commentator has used the word "dialectical."' Such a characterization is especially appropriate whenever Traherne appeals to the seventeenth-century theory of the four estates, for he consistently views the relationship among the estates dialectically: the estate of misery negates the estate of innocence; and the estates of grace and glory are the temporal and eternal negations, respectively, of the estate of misery.2 But if this description of his logic is accurate, it is also incomplete. For whereas at times he sees the movement from one estate to the next primarily as the result of external pressures placed on the individual, in other works he assumes that every estate has implicit shortcomings that surface in the normal course of events and lead to the negation of that estate. His well-known poem "Shadows in the Water" most clearly exemplifies the latter kind of work.3 In order to explicate the underlying logic in this poem, and thereby to observe Traherne's dialectical abilities at their most subtle, this essay briefly describes its dialectic in the abstract, and then traces the functioning of this dialectic in detail in the stanzas themselves.

ABSTRACT Robert Nichols's Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai is a highly acclaimed but infrequently studied series of four novels from the 1970s. With a political structure consisting of communes, syndicates, and federations as well as a mixed economy and a highly developed ecological theory and practice, Nghsi-Altai offers a green anarchist utopia as an alternative to a misguided “America.” Yet the society faces potentially destabilizing problems from within, and the writing is sufficiently self-conscious to classify the utopia of the tetralogy as critical rather than programmatic.

ABSTRACT In The Dispossessed Ursula K. Le Guin layers three ethical values in order to create an interpersonal ethics designed to meet the needs of an anarchist society. Le Guin borrows the foundational layer of mutual aid, with interesting adaptations, from the work of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The second layer includes both the recognition that mutual aid cannot always be rendered and the resultant creation of a community based on shared suffering. Although it is tempting to see this layer as the high point of the ethical thought in the novel, Le Guin adds one more by imagining a type of life-long partnering bond in a society in which legalised marriage does not exist. The loyalty and sense of home that such a bond provides are crucial to the idea of the happy life as constructed in this fiction. Although this interpersonal ethics is open to charges of idealism in over-emphasising human cooperation, passivity in accepting suffering, and commitment to traditional heterosexual monogamy as essential for the full enjoyment of life, nevertheless Le Guin's thought-experiment makes a strong case for an anarchist ethics that improves upon the views of Kropotkin. Keywords: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, Peter Kropotkin, ethics, mutual aid Ursula K. Le Guin has claimed that her novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) is an attempt to embody anarchy The Wind's Twelve Quarters 1975: 232). This embodiment is to be found on Anarres, a moon/planet populated by anarchists who emigrated from their home planet Urras over a century before the earliest action in the novel. Upon dieir arrival on Anarres the setders fashioned a society which at least in theory had no established government and no coercion within the economic sphere. As a result, the creation of Anarresti society within the novel becomes a thought-experiment on the viability of anarchism and the need for permanent revolution to counter such threats as an incipient bureaucracy and a tendency toward dominance games. Although previous studies have investigated various facets of this anarchist society, more might be said specifically about the ediics within it.1 In what foUows I do not distinguish ediics from morality, address all the features of a complete ethical system, or consider whether oppressive power and its attendant evils would eventuaUy creep into any anarchist society. I am instead interested in the hmited question of what one of the most brilliant minds of our time, coming fresh from extensive reading in anarchism and utopianism, drinks an interpersonal ediics in an anarchist culture would look like. The answer, I suggest, is a layering of ediical values that together comprise a complex system designed to meet the needs of an anarchist society.2 Le Guin borrows the foundational layer of mutual aid, with intetesting adaptations, from the work of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropodein. The second layer includes both the recognition that mutual aid cannot always be rendered and the resultant creation of a community based on shared suffering. Alrhough it is tempting to see this layer as the high point of the ediical diought in the novel, Le Guin adds one more by imagining a type of life-long partnering bond in a society in which legalised marriage does not exist. The loyalty and sense of home that such a bond provides are crucial to the idea of the happy life as constructed in this fiction. Taken together, these three layers present a fidler and more satisfactory ediics than those that Kropodrin envisioned. They include not only reliance on mutual aid, but also responses to the inevitability of suffering and the need for commitment in interpersonal relationships. Although the resulting ethic is open to charges of idealism in over-emphasising human cooperation, passivity in accepting suffering, and commitment to traditional heterosexual monogamy as essential for the full enjoyment of life, neverrheless Le Guin's diought-experiment makes a strong case for an anarchist ethics that improves upon the views of Kropotkin. …

This essay reads Upon Appleton House as an attempt to answer the question What process of signification can assure fallen man that signifiers carry certain meaning? It argues that the poem considers several inconclusive answers, each dependent on a particular perspective. To lay the foundations for the poem\u27s first answer, Chapter One reconstructs the Pythagorean-Christian view that by employing God\u27s cosmic design man can construct signifiers whose ultimate signified is God Himself. The second chapter argues that the poem\u27s first nine stanzas revise the Italian architectural theory based on this Pythagorean semiotic; in order to take into account man\u27s fallen nature, these stanzas establish the operation of God\u27s grace as the guarantee of the significance of the exemplary Appleton House. Chapter Three contends that in the meadows episode Marvell examines what happens to signification when man is devoid of grace and when the stasis implied by his own architectural sem...

In The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin embodies a complementary form of anarchism on the planet Anarres. Just as in the scientific theory of the protagonist, Shevek, time is both sequential and simultaneous, so too the individual freedom and social responsibility needed for anarchism to succeed are unified by promising, which itself presupposes sequence and simultaneity. Le Guin examines several challenges to this theory of anarchy: crises that disrupt the complementarity of freedom and responsibility; fear; the desire for power; incompatible ideologies; and hopelessness. Despite the exposure of its limits, however, anarchy survives as the best political option in the novel.

ABSTRACT In The Dispossessed Ursula K. Le Guin layers three ethical values in order to create an interpersonal ethics designed to meet the needs of an anarchist society. Le Guin borrows the foundational layer of mutual aid, with interesting adaptations, from the work of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The second layer includes both the recognition that mutual aid cannot always be rendered and the resultant creation of a community based on shared suffering. Although it is tempting to see this layer as the high point of the ethical thought in the novel, Le Guin adds one more by imagining a type of life-long partnering bond in a society in which legalised marriage does not exist. The loyalty and sense of home that such a bond provides are crucial to the idea of the happy life as constructed in this fiction. Although this interpersonal ethics is open to charges of idealism in over-emphasising human cooperation, passivity in accepting suffering, and commitment to traditional heterosexual monogamy as essential for the full enjoyment of life, nevertheless Le Guin's thought-experiment makes a strong case for an anarchist ethics that improves upon the views of Kropotkin. Keywords: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, Peter Kropotkin, ethics, mutual aid Ursula K. Le Guin has claimed that her novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) is an attempt to embody anarchy The Wind's Twelve Quarters 1975: 232). This embodiment is to be found on Anarres, a moon/planet populated by anarchists who emigrated from their home planet Urras over a century before the earliest action in the novel. Upon dieir arrival on Anarres the setders fashioned a society which at least in theory had no established government and no coercion within the economic sphere. As a result, the creation of Anarresti society within the novel becomes a thought-experiment on the viability of anarchism and the need for permanent revolution to counter such threats as an incipient bureaucracy and a tendency toward dominance games. Although previous studies have investigated various facets of this anarchist society, more might be said specifically about the ediics within it.1 In what foUows I do not distinguish ediics from morality, address all the features of a complete ethical system, or consider whether oppressive power and its attendant evils would eventuaUy creep into any anarchist society. I am instead interested in the hmited question of what one of the most brilliant minds of our time, coming fresh from extensive reading in anarchism and utopianism, drinks an interpersonal ediics in an anarchist culture would look like. The answer, I suggest, is a layering of ediical values that together comprise a complex system designed to meet the needs of an anarchist society.2 Le Guin borrows the foundational layer of mutual aid, with intetesting adaptations, from the work of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropodein. The second layer includes both the recognition that mutual aid cannot always be rendered and the resultant creation of a community based on shared suffering. Alrhough it is tempting to see this layer as the high point of the ediical diought in the novel, Le Guin adds one more by imagining a type of life-long partnering bond in a society in which legalised marriage does not exist. The loyalty and sense of home that such a bond provides are crucial to the idea of the happy life as constructed in this fiction. Taken together, these three layers present a fidler and more satisfactory ediics than those that Kropodrin envisioned. They include not only reliance on mutual aid, but also responses to the inevitability of suffering and the need for commitment in interpersonal relationships. Although the resulting ethic is open to charges of idealism in over-emphasising human cooperation, passivity in accepting suffering, and commitment to traditional heterosexual monogamy as essential for the full enjoyment of life, neverrheless Le Guin's diought-experiment makes a strong case for an anarchist ethics that improves upon the views of Kropotkin. …

While the political themes and the painterly genre of Marvell's The Last Instructions to a Painter have been well understood by attentive critics, the question of the poem's style still lingers.(1) I hope to add another dimension to considerations of its style by suggesting that in The Last Instructions Marvell frequently exposes the faults of the powerful of his society not only through direct satire, but also through indirect satire by creating images of the various languages that they speak. To the extent that these linguistic images absorb his interest, Marvell's poem may be approached by means of the analytical methods that Bakhtin has developed for the novel.(2) In this essay, I shall first adopt Bakhtinian discourse categories to investigate the techniques that Marvell uses to create linguistic images. I shall then speculate on the importance of imaging languages for an assessment of Marvell's achievement in the poem. Two Bakhtinian ideas provide the foundation for this investigation. First, Bakhtin broadens the definition of "language" to include social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour. (262-63) As we shall see, in The Last Instructions Marvell demonstrates an acute ear. At various points throughout the poem he conveys professional jargons, generic languages, languages of various circles, and even languages of the hour. He incorporates so many languages into the work, in fact, that perhaps its most impressive feature is their pleasing co-existence. But simply to include many languages in a literary work is not to image them. The second idea to be drawn from Bakhtin is that for a language to receive an image it must confront another language so that its own strengths and weaknesses may be revealed. To organize this confrontation, an author must work with two languages within the same passage. Usually, both languages are clearly visible in the text, though occasionally the imaging language remains hidden and merely accents the imaged language from the outside. Moreover, the two languages must be attributable to two different linguistic consciousnesses, two voices holding different ideological positions. The incorporation of these two voices can take multiple forms: the persona can include the words of others within his or her own descriptions; the persona can be placed sufficiently far from the author so that his or her language can confront that of the author; the quoted words of characters can play off against each other and against the words of the persona; or the characteristic languages of inserted genres can interact either with each other or with the contemporary language of the persona. However such images are constructed, at stake is not only a double-voiced, double-languaged style, but also a contest between the ideologies that these social languages carry. In The Last Instructions Marvell almost never permits the voice of his persona to disappear: that is, with a handful of minor exceptions, he never directly quotes a character nor uses a generic language without letting the persona give it his own accent. Furthermore, the speaker of the poem - the persona - does not stray from Marvell's own ideological position. Consequently, all of the linguistic images in The Last Instructions mix two languages within the persona's own utterances. Bakhtin has identified five ways in which this type of mixing can be done: hybridization, parodic stylization, parody, stylization, and variation.(3) My first goal is to explore Marvell's construction of the ideological conflicts of his time in terms of these categories. II. According to Bakhtin, hybridization involves the intersection of two voices - that of the persona and that of a character or a group in society - within one utterance. …

Robert Nichols's Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai is a highly acclaimed but infrequently studied series of four novels from the 1970s. With a political structure consisting of communes, syndicates, and federations as well as a mixed economy and a highly developed ecological theory and practice, Nghsi-Altai offers a green anarchist utopia as an alternative to a misguided “America.” Yet the society faces potentially destabilizing problems from within, and the writing is sufficiently self-conscious to classify the utopia of the tetralogy as critical rather than programmatic.

In an 1880 editorial titled “To the Young,” Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin took it upon himself to advise young professionals and workers on what they should do with their lives, namely, join together to prepare for the revolution. In the tradition of that editorial, in her 2010 poem “For the Young Anarchists” Adrienne Rich gives advice to young anarchists regarding how to accomplish their task and what to expect. But whereas Kropotkin was almost completely optimistic in his appeal, Rich is far more ambivalent, referring to skills that take generations to perfect and that even when used correctly yield at best only ambiguous results. The twenty-eight lines of the poem employ an extended metaphor implicitly comparing anarchist and other kinds of transformative social and political activity to opening an oyster. Rich begins with what we should not do. We should not act like seagulls and try to open oysters by smashing them on the rocks. Mindless violence born of anger is not the way. Instead, we should act like the skilled oysterman who works with an “astuteness honed through / generations to extract / the meat” (lines 8–10). Even then, the oyster might slip through our fingers and get kicked in the sand, never to be eaten. It is not that Rich does not understand the anger that drives young anarchists. On the contrary, she acknowledges that it is the beginning of political movements and, even more, that “only fury knowing its ground / has staying power” (19–20). But if anger motivates the movement, more is required for anarchists to be successful. After the anger they have to “go dead calm remembering / what this operation calls for— / eye, hand, mind” (21–23). Anarchism requires its own version of the “gauging eyes, torqued wrist / hand sliding the knife” (5–6). It requires thought, patience, an ability

... For example, we would have this delightful account of the games played by the Nymph and the fawn: It is a wond'rous thing, how fleet 'Twas on those little silver feet. With what a pretty skipping grace, It oft would challenge me the Race: And when 'thad left me far away, 'Twould ...

In order to characterize Traherne's predominant process of thought, more than one commentator has used the word "dialectical."' Such a characterization is especially appropriate whenever Traherne appeals to the seventeenth-century theory of the four estates, for he consistently views the relationship among the estates dialectically: the estate of misery negates the estate of innocence; and the estates of grace and glory are the temporal and eternal negations, respectively, of the estate of misery.2 But if this description of his logic is accurate, it is also incomplete. For whereas at times he sees the movement from one estate to the next primarily as the result of external pressures placed on the individual, in other works he assumes that every estate has implicit shortcomings that surface in the normal course of events and lead to the negation of that estate. His well-known poem "Shadows in the Water" most clearly exemplifies the latter kind of work.3 In order to explicate the underlying logic in this poem, and thereby to observe Traherne's dialectical abilities at their most subtle, this essay briefly describes its dialectic in the abstract, and then traces the functioning of this dialectic in detail in the stanzas themselves.

... 180-82]. Virgil Lokke is professor emeritus of English at Purdue University, ... When theory functions as useful sludge, the key to any significant flow of the discourse depends upon what ChristopherNorris in The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction ...

In The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650), the Ranter Jacob Bauthumley presents his version of a realised eschatology in a generous style. His eschatology centres on God as the animating force in humanity. Bauthumley believes in sin but denies its true being. For him, most people live in the hell of their self-being without recognising the divine being within them. At the end of the world, personal existence will end as God will return to being all in all within himself. In a style matching his theology, Bauthumley presents a self-effacing persona, openly defines his theology, judges no person, and prefers a vocabulary of sweetness and joy to the harsher language so common in the theological discourse of his times.